Efficient, cost-effective family weight loss program will treat more than 1000 parents and children – UB News Center

With $8.8 million NIH grant, UB medical researchers will make cost-effective family weight-loss methods available through primary care offices

BUFFALO, N.Y. – Weight-loss programs for children and
parents are far more successful when the whole family is treated
together. The problem is, such programs are usually located in
specialty clinics, unavailable to the general public.

Now, Leonard Epstein, PhD, SUNY Distinguished Professor at the
Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at the University
at Buffalo, who pioneered the family-based approach to weight loss,
has been awarded an $8.8 million grant from the National Institutes
of Health to start making such successful family-based weight-loss
programs more widely available.

The weight-loss programs will begin in spring 2017 in primary
care offices located in Buffalo and Rochester, New York; Columbus,
Ohio; and St. Louis, Missouri. The five-year grant will allow the
programs to treat more than 500 families, reaching more than 1,000
overweight or obese children and parents as well as more than 200
siblings who are overweight or obese.

“The purpose of this grant is to implement and evaluate
highly successful family-based obesity treatment in the primary
care setting, an optimal setting given the established relationship
between patients and their primary care providers,” said
Epstein.

He is division chief of behavioral medicine in the Department of
Pediatrics at the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical
Sciences, an internationally recognized expert on childhood weight
control and family intervention, and one of the most productive
investigators in behavioral medicine and nutrition. During one
10-year study of overweight children who had participated in
Epstein’s research, the percentage able to maintain a healthy
weight at 10-year follow-up was 50 percent, far higher than the
usual percentage, which is typically 10 percent or less.

Steven Lana, MD, managing partner of Delaware Pediatrics, one of
the Buffalo practices that will participate, said there is a
compelling need for interventions that promote weight loss and
maintenance in children. “The UB study of family-based
behavioral treatment offers us a unique opportunity to provide an
evidence-based, multicomponent intervention to improve treatment
outcomes for our patients. We are eager to support this project
because we witness the early start of obesity complications that
can significantly influence the children and families in our
practice.”

Integrity Health Group, based in Amherst, and Williamsville
Pediatric Center are the other participating primary care practices
located in Western New York.

The new study will compare two weight-control approaches in more
than a dozen primary care providers’ offices. One group will
get an enhanced version of the standard treatment, where parent and
child receive information on healthy eating and are seen by the
physician four times over two years.

Families receiving the intervention will be seen in the
doctor’s office by their own physician, as well as by health
counselors trained to deliver family-based weight-control programs
tailored to the needs of each family.

“With this grant, we are placing health coaches on the
front lines,” said Epstein.

A key goal of the grant is to find out how primary care
providers’ offices can best deliver weight-control assistance
to their patients.

 “We want to know how to overcome some of the
barriers — such as staffing, space, funding and attitudes — that
primary care practices may face when using empirically tested
research in treatment programs,” said Epstein. “We will
have to find ways to help them provide services that they
traditionally haven’t had the time to provide at the pace the
families need for ultimate success and on a flexible schedule that
can best accommodate patients.”

The grant is an example of translational research that aims to
accelerate or “translate” findings from the laboratory
into the real-world clinical setting. That was the focus of the $16
million Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) received
last fall by UB and its partners, which put UB into a select group
of medical schools nationwide that are leading translational
research.

Epstein noted that his current grant will take a
multidisciplinary “team science” approach, which is
characteristic of translational research. He is partnering with
Teresa Quattrin, MD, chair of the Department of Pediatrics at UB,
A. Conger Goodyear Professor of Pediatrics and chief, Division of
Endocrinology/Diabetes and Pediatrics at Women and Children’s
Hospital of Buffalo. She also is president of UBMD Pediatrics.

Quattrin’s research also underscores the success of
family-based, weight-loss treatment. Her 2014 study in Pediatrics
showed that preschoolers in a family weight-control program
experienced normal weight gain while peers in a control group
gained more weight. At the same time, parents in the family
weight-loss program lost an average of 14 pounds, while parents in
the control group didn’t lose weight.

“That pivotal trial demonstrated that family-based
treatment can be implemented in the primary care setting, leading
to more weight loss in children and parents compared to treating
the child alone,” said Quattrin. “In this new phase, we
will further extend this experience to answer the challenge of
translating this experience across different clinical realities
around the country in a multicenter trial treating 6-12-year-old
children and parents who are overweight or obese.”

 

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